Robots were different 50 years ago because simply put, there was no surefire way to gain so much control over the robot. Programming has gotten so much more complex to do, in thanks to computer programming languages and things of that nature. Mostly to me, robots have changed so much with the dawn of computer programming languages.

There is a large difference between programming on  a computer and programming on a robot. On a computer, you can just enter lines of text on a computer and you never can see behind the scenes. Programming on a robot, on the other hand, is much different because is you can see quite literally if you have a bug or not in your code. Robots will act eratic or do the opposite of what you had intended.

Yes. The design if a robot is truly crucial to it's functionality because that is really the rule across the world of tech. Design is not just how something looks, but how it works (As once said by the overly creepy Jony Ive). If you change the design, you essentially change how the entire thing works. If you wind up with a bad design, you'll probably end up with bad functionality. This really is how the tech market operates, and this can definitely carry over to the robotics industry as well.

1. Isaac Asimov's three laws of robotics are 1)A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2) A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. These laws are important as we make robots that are more and more complex. These laws essentially make it so that people design their robots with morality in mind and that no humans are harmed during the use of these robots. This essentially is why I am so afraid of AI becoming a huge hit among the computer world. To me, this is the most important type of AI and robotics design.

Robots, in fact, do not need to be humanoids. The most efficient designs are the pick and place robots used in car manufacturing. These robots usually consist of one mechanical arm that reaches for something and then drops it. This has been tried and tested since the 50's. Yes, any machine that is automated is indeed a robot to me.

Many people don't know that you can draw some basic graphics with Python. Python has a graphics library called turtle, and you can do some basic 2D rendering and drawing with it. 20 years ago this was a god tool because it was one of the only drawing tools that existed. It fulfilled all of the needs of developers and programmers 20 years ago on basic screens, but today is quite limited. You can only do some 2D rendering, and some basic colors. it is not optimized for high definition displays either.

Last class, we learned about Python functions. The functions we learned are very basic, and really are to be used as a stepping stone to go onto grater programming projects. Functions are usd for anything that, well, needs to function. The example given was when the guy needed to make some breakfast and then he went on to making breakfast for friends, etc. Then, he needed to put away some dishes, and showed some neat little programming tricks to keep the amount of code you had to write down while still maintaining proper functionality. Functions really are the heart of programming because they actually do things.